Tango is not only a fascinating dance, but also a fascinating idea, philosophy, culture, and lifestyle. In many ways, tango is a metaphor of life. The pursuit of tango is the pursuit of connection, love, unity, beauty, harmony and humanity, i.e., an idealism that is not consistent with the dehumanizing reality of the modern world. The world divides us as individuals, but tango unites us as a people and species. In tango we are not individualists, feminists, nationalists, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, etc., but interconnected and interdependent members of the human family. We are humanists. Tango calls us to tear down the walls, to build bridges, and to regain humanity through connection, cooperation, reconciliation and compromise. If you share this conviction, please join the conversation and let your voice be heard, which is urgently needed and long overdue.

Together we can awaken the world.

June 18, 2016

In the beginning there is no money. People barter. I fish, you farm, and she weaves fabric. I use my fish to trade your
vegetables and her cloth. As this becomes a common practice, the issue of
equivalent trade emerges and the exchange rates of all kinds of products have
been established. For example, one square foot of cloth equals two pounds of fish or
three pounds of vegetable - according to the amounts of labor involved in producing these products. But such direct barter is inconvenient. You may want
my fish, but I don't want your vegetables but her cloth, and she doesn't want
my fish but your vegetables. What shall we do? Thus, money, as a universal
equivalent, comes into being. With money, trade becomes easier.

Initially, money is things that people all desire, such as
salt, silk and gold. People first convert their own products into such
goods, and then use these goods to exchange for other products. A pound of fish is worth ten ounces of salt because the labor involved in producing a pound of fish is equivalent to the labor involved in producing ten ounces of salt. Gold eventually becomes the most popular form of money because it is easy to carry and can be conveniently cut into pieces to accurately measure the values of other products.

But people soon
realize that this way of exchange is still cumbersome. Since the function of money is to measure or represent the amount of labor involved in producing the product, a piece of paper, which is easier to carry and use, can do the same job. Thus, money changes form from a material good to a bill.
People then discovered that even the bill is not necessary. Since the value is expressed in numbers, the exchange can be done numerically without
a piece of paper. Thus, money changes form again from the bill to the digital
figure on a bank card. This digital figure now becomes the life ambition of
the modern people. In political euphemism, this is called "the pursuit of
happiness."

In the beginning there is no accumulation of wealth, because
fish and vegetables cannot be stored in large number, they will rot. Trade is
only for daily consumption. But with money that is no longer the case. Money
can be accumulated infinitely and passed on to future generations. It can also
be used to loan, invest and speculate in order to generate returns. With money
I can buy vegetables from you and sell to her, and buy textiles from her and
sell to you for a profit. It is then discovered that I don't even need to
possess the commodities to trade. One can do short sales and still make money. Thus trade is no longer for consumption. It becomes the mere means of accumulating wealth.

Making money through trade is a tricky business. Strictly
speaking there is no fair trade, or no profit can be made. One can only gain
from someone else's loss. For example, an employer makes money by taking
advantage of the employees. Wall Street takes advantage of the
regulators' ignorance on the dubious formulas they created to make money at the
expenses of the ordinary investors and loanees. The insurance company takes
advantage of people's sense of security, since more people are healthy than
sick and alive than dead, the insurance company can make money by selling
an empty promise. Jealous of the insurance company, the drug company increases the
price of their product 5000%. You either buy or die, and it is paid by the
insurance anyway. Hospitals make their money in the same way. I went to a
hospital for a skin condition. They first sent me to a family doctor, who sent me to the
lab to have the test down, and then sent me to a specialist. The specialist knew immediately it was eczema without seeing the test. The prescribed cream
cost me $15 and the eczema was cured. But the hospital bill is $800, which is
paid for by the insurance. The insurance company shifts the cost to the
consumers by raising the premium and reducing the coverage. Health insurance
once covered everything, now you have to buy separate insurances for teeth,
eyes, ears and drugs. House insurance once covered everything, now you have to
buy separate insurances for fire, flood, tornado and earthquake.

Such practices undermined the fundamental principle in trade. The essence of trade is the exchange of labor. A fair exchange reflects the equivalent amounts of labor involved in producing the products. Since the exchange rates of all products are proportional, the increase in price of one product will trigger a chain reaction of inflation. As a result, houses, cars, food, groceries, clothes, utilities, services, all become more expensive, and the government has to raise taxes just to keep even if nothing else. The
victims are the ordinary people. In today's America, 63% of people are
unable to pay a $500 surprise bill, but a small number of people benefiting from the unfair practice and the system that they have created have accumulated tremendous wealth that reached
astronomical figures.

Greed knows no limit and most crimes of our times, caught
or not caught, are motivated by money. In a mammonish society, science, education and medicine all become the means of making money, and money respects no morality. The winners are
those who have found ingenious ways to abuse others, and the losers are the ripped-offs. As a result, people lost faith in goodness, honesty, fairness and trust. A man once could feed the whole family, not anymore because the price becomes so
outrageous that women also have to work in order to maintain the middle class
standard of living. Feminists may call it "women's rights" and "equal opportunities". In fact, it is enslavement of women. A woman lamented,
"More and more women work extremely hard to make money now. The society
provides women with less and less security. Security used to mean a commitment, a
clasped hand when crossing the street, now it is the money in our pocket and a
fully charged cell phone... We all want to marry a man, only to find ourselves
turned into a man!"

When a society allows people to accumulate unlimited wealth,
measures success by one's money, uses the rich as the role models for the whole society to follow, provides
them with legal loopholes and preferential treatments, and allows them to
influence the policy making with their money, it is bound that people will want
to get rich quickly and use any possible means to make money, that the society will be
subject to increasing polarization, that the morality will deteriorate, that
the humanity will be corrupted, that the crime will increase, that the natural
resources will be depleted, and that the environment will be destroyed.
Mammonism is the cancer of the modern world, which dehumanizes people and turns them into the slaves of money. When mankind invented money, nobody
thought it would lead to the alienation of the humanity. How to awaken mankind
from this insanity is one of the most intractable problems facing modern
philosophy, economics, sociology and political science.